The Royal Society has a beauty pageant moment

“So, Miss Royal Society, if there were three things you could change about the world, what would they be?”

OK, so there isn’t a Miss Royal Society (it’s proving hard enough to get the Society to elect female fellows in respectable numbers). But a report issued by the Society today reads like the answers often heard from toothsome beauties in swimsuits.

The report is on issues relating to global population and consumption. The Society’s first request is that “the international community must bring the 1.3 billion people living on less than $1.25 per day out of absolute poverty, and reduce the inequality that persists in the world today.” The Royal Society doesn’t want any children to go to bed hungry, you see.

Second, they’d like people to stop being so greedy: “The most developed and the emerging economies must stabilise and then reduce material consumption levels.”

Third, they want people in developing countries to stop having so many babies.

If it really were a beauty pageant, we’d all gape in awe at the gaffe, then share the video with our friends. We could share the 5.7MB PDF of the report, but really, that’s a lot to read when the top three recommendations are, respectively, banal, naive and reminiscent of an edict issued on behalf of the British Empire in the latter part of the 18th century.

The case study given for the family planning problem is Niger, where the report tells us “over a quarter of women older than 40 have given birth to 10 or more children.” The report explains that Niger’s high fertility is not, for the most part, due to poverty, education or access to family planning. The biggest problem, the report says, is the double-barrelled shotgun of Niger’s polygamous culture, and – wait for it – its “large desired family size”.

Yes, they actually want all these children! In fact, the report goes on to admit that married women in Niger want an average of 8.8 children. So let’s put that first statistic another way: the majority of women in Niger have, or will have, roughly the number of children they’d like to have. That’s not a problem, surely?

Well, apparently it is. The Royal Society’s issue is that, from a global perspective, these women really aren’t team players: they are producing more than their fair share of humans.

In science circles, there’s an old joke about theoretical physicists helping out a troubled dairy farmer. It’s not actually that funny, so I’ll cut straight to the punchline where the physicists say, “first let’s assume the cow is a sphere.” The point is that science is often ill-equipped for realities outside the lab. The Royal Society’s report is well-intentioned, and Sir John Sulston, the chair of the panel that produced it, is both an excellent scientist and by all accounts a deeply impressive human being. The problem is, scientists are good at science, and beauty pageant contestants are generally beautiful. From the evidence presented so far, these are not qualities that seem to qualify either group as advisors on world affairs.

A quote-by-quote analysis of how little Jeremy Hunt understands technology

In today’s “Did we do something wrong? No, it was social media” news, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has argued that technology companies need to do more to prevent sexting and cyber-bullying.

Hunt, whose job it is to help reduce the teenage suicide rate, argued that the onus for reducing the teenage suicide rate should fall on social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter.

Giving evidence to the Commons Health Committee on suicide prevention, Hunt said: “I think social media companies need to step up to the plate and show us how they can be the solution to the issue of mental ill health amongst teenagers, and not the cause of the problem.”

Pause for screaming and/or tearing out of hair.

Don’t worry though; Hunt wasn’t simply trying to pass the buck, despite the committee suggesting he direct more resources to suicide prevention, as he offered extremely well-thought out technological solutions that are in no way inferior to providing better sex education for children. Here’s a quote-by-quote analysis of just how technologically savvy Hunt is.

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“I just ask myself the simple question as to why it is that you can’t prevent the texting of sexually explicit images by people under the age of 18…”

Here’s Hunt asking himself a question that he should be asking the actual experts, which is in no way a waste of anybody’s time at all.

“… If that’s a lock that parents choose to put on a mobile phone contract…”

A lock! But of course. But what should we lock, Jeremy? Should teenager’s phones come with a ban on all social media apps, and for good measure, a block on the use of the camera app itself? It’s hard to see how this would lead to the use of dubious applications that have significantly less security than giants such as Facebook and Snapchat. Well done.

“Because there is technology that can identify sexually explicit pictures and prevent it being transmitted.”

Erm, is there? Image recognition technology does exist, but it’s incredibly complex and expensive, and companies often rely on other information (such as URLs, tags, and hashes) to filter out and identify explicit images. In addition, social media sites like Facebook rely on their users to click the button that identifies an image as an abuse of their guidelines, and then have a human team that look through reported images. The technology is simply unable to identify individual and unique images that teenagers take of their own bodies, and the idea of a human team tackling the job is preposterous.

But suppose the technology did exist that could flawlessly scan a picture for fleshy bits and bobs? As a tool to prevent sexting, this still is extremely flawed. What if two teens were trying to message one another Titian’s Venus for art or history class? In September, Facebook itself was forced to U-turn after removing the historical “napalm girl” photo from the site.

As for the second part of Jezza’s suggestion, if you can’t identify it, you can’t block it. Facebook Messenger already blocks you from sending pornographic links, but this again relies on analysis of the URLs rather than the content within them. Other messaging services, such as Whatsapp, offer end-to-end encryption (EE2E), meaning – most likely to Hunt’s chagrin – the messages sent on them are not stored nor easily accessed by the government.

“I ask myself why we can’t identify cyberbullying when it happens on social media platforms by word pattern recognition, and then prevent it happening.”

There is simply no algorithm yet intelligent enough to identify bullying language. Why? Because we call our best mate “dickhead” and our worst enemy “pal”. Human language and meaning is infinitely complex, and scanning for certain words would almost definitely lead to false positives. As Labour MP Thangam Debbonaire famously learned this year, even humans can’t always identify whether language is offensive, so what chance does an algorithm stand?

(Side note: It is also amusing to imagine that Hunt could even begin to keep up with teenage slang in this scenario.)

Many also argue that because social media sites can remove copyrighted files efficiently, they should get better at removing abusive language. This is a flawed argument because it is easy to search for a specific file (copyright holders will often send social media giants hashed files which they can then search for on their databases) whereas (for the reasons outlined above) it is exceptionally difficult for algorithms to accurately identify the true meaning of language.

“I think there are a lot of things where social media companies could put options in their software that could reduce the risks associated with social media, and I do think that is something which they should actively pursue in a way that hasn’t happened to date.”

Leaving aside the fact that social media companies constantly come up with solutions for these problems, Hunt has left us with the burning question of whether any of this is even desirable at all.

Why should he prevent under-18s from sexting when the age of consent in the UK is 16? Where has this sudden moral panic about pornography come from? Are the government laying the ground for mass censorship? If two consenting teenagers want to send each other these aubergine emoji a couple of times a week, why should we stop them? Is it not up to parents, rather than the government, to survey and supervise their children’s online activities? Would education, with all of this in mind, not be the better option? Won't somebody please think of the children?

“There is a lot of evidence that the technology industry, if they put their mind to it, can do really smart things.”

Alas, if only we could say the same for you Mr Hunt.

Amelia Tait is a technology and digital culture writer at the New Statesman.